Home Front

This resource is aimed at secondary school students and contains over 20 pages of activities.

The online materials draw on the rich collection of photos and the brief history provided in the Australians in World War I: Home Front commemorative publication, which was printed in early 2012 and is the fifth and final book in the series.

Chapter 8: The fault lines open (1915–16)

The Gallipoli campaign ended in a defeat that somehow seemed a kind of victory. But in Europe the war bogged down in the trenches of the Western Front, which cut through France and Belgium, and nothing resembling victory could be detected no matter how hard anyone looked. Armies were growing larger, weapons more murderous, requests for reinforcements more urgent. Most of the AIF went into the trenches in 1916, but more men seemed necessary if the war was to be won. A Universal Service League called on Australians to compel men to fight overseas just as they already compelled young men to do militia service at home. Australia had done much for the war effort, the League announced, but 'she has not done enough'.1

William Morris Hughes agreed, and his opinion mattered. In October 1915 this crafty, courageous, combative Labor politician became prime minister, and during the following summer he nudged Australia's men to enlist by sending a million printed forms through the mail demanding they state their willingness or otherwise to put on uniform. Some responded positively. Others ignored the call or even sneered at it. 'I don't believe in being bluffed into enlisting' and 'I am not prepared to go while the big bugs remain behind' were some of the hostile responses heard in the mining town of Beaconsfield in Tasmania.2

The big bugs were bosses said to be profiting from war orders. Economic growth returned when the imperial government in London decided to buy all the beef, wool and wheat that Australia could provide, and the federal government put in orders to equip its troops and navy. Yet prices continued to rise. Businessmen who lived off profits, a Grafton resident complained, were refusing to take their share of the war's burden, passing it instead 'to the people who have already paid in the blood of their sons'.3 Hughes tried to halt inflation and put a lid on profits by imposing price controls, but success was limited. He abandoned altogether an election promise to hold a referendum about curbing business monopolies. Australians who were least insulated from economic hardship began to resent the shelving of pre-war promises like this. Those who saw socialism as something more than a vague goal already resented a war that, in the bitter words of a notorious pamphlet, was making 'the living worker a slave'.4

Some middle-class Australians were angry that anyone could think like this. They traced the movements of armies on maps in their homes, nodded their heads in church when clergymen preached that moral reform was needed for military victory, and spoke of the enemy as militaristic, as barbarians, as baby-killers. The Germans were fighting 'for the triumph of a system of spiritual enslavement', one professor lectured, ‘of harsh repression, and a more immoral standard of international conduct than has ever disgraced the world since Christianity first dawned upon it’.5 ‘Unless the men and women in this country are seized with the seriousness of the situation’, a banker insisted in another pamphlet, ‘there is little chance for it or the empire’.6

Sometimes the empire seemed to be running a distinct second to the small pleasures of the poorer man’s life: going to the cinema, watching the football and horse races, yelling at a boxing match, and above all drinking beer. Some people said beer was at the bottom of a riot by soldiers at the Casula camp in February 1916 that spread to Sydney and cost one man his life. The riot encouraged campaigners who, long before the war, had called for pubs to close early. The New South Wales premier announced a vote on early closing like one already held in South Australia. To vote 'yes' was patriotic, wasn't it? The king himself had given up grog for the duration. Many Australians, generally women, either agreed or welcomed any chance to prise husbands and brothers out of their drinking holes. By the end of the war, pubs across the south-east quarter of Australia were shutting their doors at 6 pm—to the disgust of many men also reeling from a similar assault on another favourite pastime. Calls to give up sport and gambling and focus on the war led to the cancellation of much competition-level sport during 1915. By 1917 the federal government was using its wartime powers 'to curtail sport meetings' and so 'concentrate the minds of the people on the more serious aspects of the war'.7

The war was opening rifts between the Labor party and its socialist wing, between the middle class and the poor, and between some women and men. But people came together to celebrate the first Anzac Day on 25 April 1916. 'It was just a little thing to do to mark the glorious deeds performed by Australians', a newspaper explained cautiously, never dreaming that Australia would mark the day ever after.8 The men who stormed Gallipoli seemed to have given their corner of the world a history of its own for the first time. Before the war 'it was assumed that Australia only lived by the grace of England', smiled the Catholic newspaper Freeman's Journal, but 'Anzac Day has changed all that'.9